AN ANCIENT DOUBLE STANDARD

There was a time not too long ago that contemporary historians doubted the
authorship by Moses of the first five books of the Bible. The reasoning
was along the lines that since Moses lived around 1,400 BC and writing wasn't
invented until some time later therefore Moses could not have written the books
that bear his name. They must consequently have been written by a less
prestigious individual who used Moses' name to give the books greater importance
than they would otherwise have enjoyed. The net result was a simple excuse
by which to discredit the rest of the Bible as well; after all, if it was not to
be trusted right at the start why should it be trusted further in. Further
research, however, discovered that Hammurabi, a king of Babylon who
established it as an important centre around 1750 BC, had also published a
sophisticated code of law which was in fact quite similar to that found in the
Bible. Suddenly the argument changed from "Moses could not have written
the books that bear his name since writing had not yet been invented," to "The
similarity between the two codes indicates that Moses must have copied his law
from the law of Hammurabi." In either case it was the validity of the
Bible that was discounted yet as far as ancient texts are concerned the Bible
has far more reliability than any other body of ancient writing. (By
reliable I mean that there exists more evidence that the Bible we read today is
essentially as it was originally written than exists for any other body of
ancient writing.) Clearly it is not unbiased interpretation of the facts
that is yielding these conclusions but a desire to discredit the Bible as a
document worthy of our trust. If this could be done much of the
intellectual support for Christianity would fall. One of the great
problems of archaeology, indeed any inquiry into unfamiliar areas, is that we
depend much more on our presuppositions. If we approach ancient literature
with the idea that man began as a primitive and developed a greater
sophistication as time moved on then we will be forced to doubt the validity of
sophisticated thought that is thought to have existed before our presuppositions
tell us existed. At some point we must allow the ancient writers of the
Bible to speak for themselves, without forcing them to bend to our predetermined
understanding of history.